Rigo’s voice, coming demandingly from behind her, startled her into a tiny scream, abruptly choked off. “May I ask where you have been?”
“I went with Persun Pollut to take Rowena bon Damfels to Commons, Rigo, where she could get medical care. Her son and two serving women were with her. We dropped him back at the bon Damfels village and came straight home.”
Looking into her wide eyes, innocent of any attempt to deceive him, he tried to sneer, tried to say something cutting, but could not quite. “Rowena?”
“Stavenger had beaten her—badly, I’m afraid.”
“For what?” he asked in astonishment. To beat a woman had always been, in Rigo’s philosophy, to abandon honor.
“For coming here to ask about Janetta,” she said. “Rowena and Sylvan came here to ask about Janetta. They hoped … hope that Dimity may turn up alive. Dimity. Rowena’s youngest daughter. Sylvan’s sister. The girl who disappeared. That’s why they were here.”
“I didn’t seeRowenahere,” he said, his emphasis reminding her that he had seen Sylvan.
“When they were here, Rowena started sobbing. She left the room for a few moments, Tony took her to my room.”
“Leaving you with her son. And what did you two talk about?” He felt his habitual anger surging just below the surface. What had they talked about, Sylvan and Marjorie? What had she shared with him that she would not share with her husband!
She sighed, wearily rubbing at her eyes, which infuriated him further. “I tried to tell you before, Rigo, but you don’t want to hear about the Hippae. You didn’t want to listen.”
He stared at her for a long, cold moment, trying not to say what, eventually, he could not keep himself from saying. “No. I do not want to hear any of Sylvan’s fairy tales about the Hippae.”
She swallowed painfully, trying not to let the frustration show on her face. “Are you interested in hearing what Brother Mainoa of the Green Brothers may have to tell you about the same subject?”
He wanted more than anything else to hurt her enough that she would cry. He had seldom seen her cry.
“Brother Mainoa?” he sneered. “Are you having an affair with him, too?”
She stared at him in disbelief, noting his heightened color, his fiery eyes, like Stella’s eyes. He was saying the kinds of things Stella liked to say, wanting to hurt, not minding that he knew they were not true.
Before he had spoken, she had almost cried, out of weariness if for no other reason, but his words burned all that away. Flames came up around her, red and hot and crackling. It was an unfamiliar feeling, an anger so intense that there was no guilt in it at all. The words came out of her like projectiles, fired without thought, without needing to think.
“Brother Mainoa is about the age of my father,” she said in a clear, cold voice which she could scarcely hear over the flame noises in her head. “An old man, rather unsteady on his feet. He has been here for many, many years. He may have some clue which would be valuable to us in the task we were sent here to do. But do not trouble yourself about Brother Mainoa…”
“Perhaps when you have ridden to the Hunt and proven your manhood as you so constantly need to do—and if you return— perhaps then we can discuss what we are here for.”
He tried to interrupt her, but she held up her hand, forbidding him, her face like fiery ice. “In the meantime you may be assured that I have never had an ‘affair’ with anyone. Until now, Rigo, I had left the breaking of our vows to you,”
He had never heard her speak in that way. He had never known she could. Tonight he had wanted only to crush her self-control, believing it stood as a barrier between them. He had wanted their growing coldness to be burned away by anger so she would come to him, as she always did, apologizing, asking his forgiveness….
Instead he had provoked an anger he could neither calm nor encompass. She turned and went away from him and he saw her go as though she were leaving him forever.